Here’s an interesting UI concept that Quentin from TOKI WOKI sent me: fluid corners. Go ahead and view the demo here. I think the name isn’t quite right at communicating the idea behind the concept — something like elastic toolbars would probably describe it better. But whatever you want to call it, it’s a very smart way to help keep important controls visible on windows that get dragged partially offscreen.

It’s a case of the user’s power being seized by the designer, albeit a very tiny amount. People spent the time learning your interface — they’ve invested this time — and as a result they’ve gained a little power in the world — that is, they’ve gained the ability to better control their environment. With every interface change, their level of control gets pushed back a little, and they have to reorient themselves around the new design. But what&rsqu

Is this the first case of a labelless button in software? You can probably find some buttons on hardware without any labels (e.g. the buttons on a mouse), but I can’t recall any examples of this in software. Even the traffic lights on Mac OS X windows show their little symbols when you hover over them. Here though what we have is an empty shell that uses its skewed outline and placement rather than an inner label to communicate its purpose.

This was one feature that made Chrome more usable for me compared to Safari. Firefox also has the ability to use the address bar to search, though it’s not the default state (and yes, IE and Opera have this too). This unified search/address bar has worked very well in Chrome, and I’m surprised all other browsers haven’t adopted this already as the default.

A fair while back I wrote a post on pressed button states using CSS, which was a tutorial on how to implement a pressed down button effect on custom styled links. In that post I used images to achieve the visual effect. Now that we have good CSS3 support, that method is really out of date. In this post I’ll show you how to achieve the same effect using CSS3, as well as how I’d go about styling the rest of the button.

There’s an interesting post over at TechCrunch discussing the current hot topic of the iPad design — or more specifically: how Apple has created a design for a tablet that is so simple and obvious that their competition has no other way forward but to implement their own products the same way, suffering Apple lawsuits in the process…

Clicking on a section of the carousel will bring that section into focus, but the carousel is still in rotation mode so it will switch to the next one in seconds. This forces me to have to rush to read all of the text and look at the cover quickly — not a pleasant user experience. Apple gets it right though:

Ive’s latest work is the same in that it is a ruthless elimination of the unnecessary, which leaves a very simple, minimalist design of metal and glass. What’s interesting about this is that while his direction is the timeless, the products themselves are not — they keep changing every other year, and every other model gets its own design refresh. Fashion is essential if you want to sell more product. The new models will not be as attractive if they look just like the old model

Sudjic opens the book with an anecdote about his experience purchasing a MacBook at Heathrow Airport. It was an impulse purchase and the author desrcribes in detail how Apple was able to utilize design to make the product enticing, an almost irresistable buy…

In other words: we know what a physical material like wood smells and feels like, and those sensations play a part in our relationship with it. We enjoy the texture, the feel of it, the smell, which is why its textures are oftentimes imitated on cheaper firniture and fooring. In the same way, the skeuomorphic interface that uses wood textures on a computer display aims to capitalize on our favorable disposition towards this material by getting us to recall those positive associations. It cannot

While Higgs attacks the skeuomorphic elements by calling them aesthetic infantilism I think there is a more practical explanation. The minimalist exterior of the products in question isn’t bland and cheap. Apple uses materials like glass and metal to create a sense of luxury, durability and value in their products, especially when contrasted with the plastic goods of their competitors. The reason the products themselves follow a minimalist design is becuase this is the most practical appro

Here’s the most streamlined signup process I’ve seen yet. Stripe, a really cool new payment processor, has your standard demo button at the bottom of their landing page. Clicking on it takes you right into the admin dashboard for the app. Now…other apps have a demo function, that’s nothing new, but what’s interesting about Stripe is that they actually create a fresh account for you when you try it out, so you’re not just browsing with a demo account, you&rsqu

Now, you don’t have to rely on your imagination: I’ve added some JavaScript buttons you can use to try out the different sizes on this very post. Try them out until you get a size that feels right and then vote using the poll below. Note: as we’re picking a body font readability is vital, so pick the size that’s easiest for you to read. Also, this isn’t about pixels vs. ems vs. points—the measurement isn’t in question here so lets leave that argument asi

One thing that strikes me about PC manufacturers is just how disconnected their marketing is from the software that will run on their machines. One sign of this is the blank screens shown on the product pictures of their latest products. Sometimes these screens have a picture of some actual software running on the machine, but oftentimes it’s either blank or has the product title pasted over it. Here’s a picture of Asus' latest Ultrabook, taken from their website:

Recently, I bought an iPod Touch to learn about the mobile web experience. I used it for, amongst other things, managing my website and accessing Facebook.